Friday, 1 September 2017

Politics and the internet, 1994 & 1996

"I don't, for a moment, think this is the politics of the future"

Two videos on how the political internet was viewed in the mid 1990's. The first, filmed in 1994, where the MP David Shaw talks about communicating with people around the world about his positions, is met with a level of scepticism and cynicism from his fellow panel members.

The second, a mere 18 months later, has a massive shift. The panel, generally, are supportive of the opportunities the web presents but don't seem to have a handle on what they're going to do with it or how it's going to change the nation. The sample pages shown are distinctly low-fi and are, generally, products of the early adopting fringe groups that, traditionally, didn't get a hearing within the mainstream media (because, after all, if you can get your message plastered across the front of a paper with a daily readership of millions, why would you target a few hundred thousand net users?).Still, I'm not certain any of them could have imagined the hyper-accelerated outrage loop that is modern Twitter. And now important it would suddenly become that we should all listen to it...